Philippines is world's top social media user: study

ABS-CBN News

For the third year in a row, the Philippines emerged as the country that spent the most time on social media, according to a report by creative agency We Are Social and social media management platform Hootsuite.

An average Filipino social media user spends almost 4 hours on different platforms daily followed by Brazilians and Indonesians, respectively, the report said.

The report said there are now 4.021 billion internet users worldwide as of January 2018 or more than half of the global population (53 percent).

More than half of internet users (42 percent) or around 3.2 billion are active on social media with 9 in 10 of those users accessing their chosen platforms via mobile devices.

Nearly a million people began using social media for the first time every day last year, equivalent to more than 11 new users per second.

Since January 2017, the number of internet users has grown by 248 million or 7 percent, the highest of which was in Africa at 20 percent.

Mobile phones, particularly smartphones, have become the go-to device for accessing the internet with a 52-percent share of the population followed by laptops and desktops at 43 percent.

Facebook continues to dominate the internet as the top social media platform with over 2.17 billion users, followed by YouTube with 1.5 billion users, and messaging services WhatsApp and FB messenger with 1.3 billion users each.